All Swords All The Time – Updates Tuesdays and Fridays

Help new Mexican HEMA club Kanan Academy stay open!

A new HEMA club in Mexico is reaching out to the community to keep its doors open. Mariana Lopez, founder of Kanan Academy (as well as being the founder of Esfinges and contributing artist to the HEMA Heroes trading cards) writes:

“Kanan Academy, a new HEMA club just opened in Mexico, is reaching out to the community for help to keep its doors open long enough to recruit enough students to sustain the expenses incurred by their training space. Club founder Mariana Lopez (founder of Esfinges and contributing artist to HEMA Heroes trading cards) writes:

Kanan Academy is a club dedicated to practicing HEMA in León, Guanajuato, México. We work with different manuals, but mainly Fiore, Talhoffer and Mair. We work with different weapons, but primarily focus on Ringen, Dagger, Longsword, Quarterstaff and Sickle. We currently have two main instructors with their own specialties, with a third instructor in training, with the idea that each instructor focus on teaching certain weapons. In addition to the main weapons we teach, we also engage in study groups for weapons that we don’t currently teach or that we are interested in adding to our curriculum.

In addition to our regular training, our club is also involved in the larger HEMA scene in Mexico, and takes an active role in growing the Mexican HEMA community: we help to organize international seminars like this past year’s Schwertkampf (together with Elite Fencing Club), we participate in the organization of the Antique Fencing National Tournament (TNEA in Spanish) in addition to many other events, seminars, and projects to promote and improve HEMA nationally in Mexico.

Kanan Academy was a project born from the ashes of another HEMA-related club. That club and the five years we spent training with it taught us what a HEMA club should aspire to be. When that project approached the limits of its potential to grow and evolve, we began the search and work necessary to create a new HEMA club, Kanan Academy. We are determined that one day, with enough passion and hard work, to be a competitively acknowledged club which creates committed martial artists and great quality fighters.
In most counties, it is a struggle to promote awareness and growth for HEMA out of the current niche pursuit that it is, and even more so in Mexico where HEMA is not yet as deeply established as it is in other countries. After a full year of us searching and not a single positive response, we finally found a wonderful MMA hall willing to give us a space to train, opening their space on a day they didn’t train, and allowing us use of equipment in addition to the facilities.

We have been training at this fantastic location for a little over a month, but unfortunately we are in danger of losing the ability to use the space. In order keep using this wonderful location, we need a minimum of income from our students, but have not yet had the time to develop our student base to the point where it can support it, due to the fledgling nature of our club.

We do not want to lose our wonderful new space, because that would likely mean the death of our club, due to the unavailability of alternative training spaces.

So, what do we want from you? We need to get our club established, and in order to do that we need to be able to promote our club to the point where it can become self sustaining, but without a space to train that will be impossible! In order to keep our space, we need a minimum income of 120 USD per month. We strongly believe 6 months are more than enough to get our club running smoothly, so we have made our fundraising goal 720 USD. Having this money would allow us to put all our focus and expenses into promoting and creating interest in our club, to get it to the point of being completely self-sustained, so our club can start contributing back to the HEMA community.”